Goethean Science

Goethean Science: VI: Goethes Way of Knowledge

On-line since: 16th February, 2002

VI
Goethe's Way of Knowledge

In June 1734, Johann Gottlieb Fichte sent the first sections of his
Theory of Science[ 45 ]
to Goethe. The latter wrote back to
the philosopher on June 24: “As far as I am concerned, I will
owe you the greatest thanks if you finally reconcile me with the
philosophers, with whom I can never do without and with whom I have
never been able to unite myself.” What the poet is here seeking
from Fichte is what he sought earlier from Spinoza and later from
Schelling and Hegel: a philosophical world view that would be in
accordance with his way of thinking. None of the philosophical
directions with which he became acquainted, however, brought the poet
complete satisfaction.

This fact makes our task considerably more difficult. We want to draw
nearer to Goethe from the philosophical side. If he himself had
designated one standpoint of knowledge as his own, then we could
refer to it. But this is not the case. And so the task devolves on us
to recognize the philosophical core of all we have from the poet and
to sketch a picture of it. We consider the right way to accomplish
this task to be a direction in thinking that is gained upon the
foundations of German idealistic philosophy. This philosophy sought,
in fact, in its own way to satisfy the same highest human needs to
which Goethe and Schiller devoted their lives. It came forth from the
same contemporary stream. It therefore also stands much nearer to
Goethe than do those views that to a large degree govern the sciences
today. What Goethe expressed in poetic form and what he presented
scientifically can be regarded as the consequence of a view that can
be formed out of that philosophy. They could definitely never be the
consequence of such scientific directions as our present-day ones. We
are very far removed today from that way of thinking which lay in
Goethe's nature.

It is indeed true that we must acknowledge progress in all areas of
culture. But that this progress is one into the depths of
things can hardly be asserted. For the content of an epoch, however,
only progress into the depths of things is decisive, after
all. But our epoch might best be characterized by the statement: It
rejects, as unattainable for man, any progress at all into the depths
of things. We have become faint-hearted in all areas, especially in
that of thinking and willing. With respect to thinking: one observes
endlessly, stores up the observations, and lacks the courage to
develop them into a scientific, whole view of reality. One accuses
German idealistic philosophy of being unscientific, however, because
it did have this courage. Today one wants only to look with
one's senses, not think. One has lost all trust in thinking.
One does not consider it able to penetrate into the mysteries of the
world and of life; one altogether renounces any solution to the great
riddle questions of existence. The only thing one considers possible
is: to bring what experience tells us, into a system. But in
doing so one forgets that with this view one is approaching a
standpoint considered to have been overcome long ago. The rejection
of all thinking and the insistence upon sense experience is, grasped
more deeply, nothing more, after all, than the blind faith in
revelation of the religions. The latter rests, after all, only upon
the fact that the church provides finished truths that one has to
believe. Thinking may struggle to penetrate into the deeper meaning
of these truths; but thinking is deprived of the ability to test
the truth itself, to penetrate by its own power into the depths
of the world. And the science of experience, what does it ask
of thinking? That it listen to what the facts say, and interpret,
order, etc., what is heard. It also denies to thinking the ability to
penetrate independently into the core of the world.

On the one hand, theology demands the blind subjection of thinking to
the statements of the church; on the other, science demands blind
subjection to the statements of sense observation. Here as there,
independent thinking that penetrates into the depths counts as
nothing. The science of experience forgets only one thing. Thousands
and thousands of people have looked at a sense-perceptible fact and
passed it by without noting anything striking about it. Then someone
came along who looked at it and became aware of an important law
about it. How? This can only stem from the fact that the discoverer
knew how to look differently than his predecessors. He saw the fact
with different eyes than his fellow men. In looking, he had a definite
thought as to how one must bring the fact into relationship
with other facts, what is significant for it and what is not. And so,
thinking, he set the matter in order and saw more than the others. He
saw with the eyes of the spirit. All scientific discoveries rest
on the fact that the observer knows how to observe in a way governed
by the right thought. Thinking must naturally guide
observation. It cannot do so if the researcher has lost his belief in
thinking, if he does not know what to make of thinking's
significance. The science of experience wanders helplessly about in
the world of phenomena; the sense world becomes a confusing
manifoldness for it, because it does not have enough energy in
thinking to penetrate into the center.

One speaks today of limits to knowledge because one does not know
where the goal of thinking lies. One has no clear view of what
one wants to attain and doubts that one will attain it. If
someone came today and pointed out clearly to us the solution to the
riddle of the world, we would gain nothing from it, because we would
not know what to make of this solution.

And it is exactly the same with willing and acting. One cannot set
oneself any definite task in life of which one would be capable. One
dreams oneself into indefinite unclear ideals and then complains
about the fact that one does not achieve something of which one
hardly has a dim, let alone a clear, picture. Just ask one of the
pessimists of our day what he actually wants and what it is he
despairs of attaining. He does not know. Problematical natures are
they all, incapable of meeting any situation and yet satisfied with
none. Do not misunderstand me. I do not wish to extol that
superficial optimism which, satisfied with the trivial enjoyments of
life, demands nothing higher and therefore never suffers want. I do
not wish to condemn individuals who painfully feel the deep tragedy
that lies in the fact that we are dependent on conditions that have a
laming effect on everything we do and that we strive in vain to
change. But we should not forget that pain is the woof and happiness
the warp. Think of the mother, how her joy in the well-being of her
children is increased if it has been achieved by earlier cares,
suffering, and effort. Every right-minded person would in fact have
to refuse a happiness that some external power might offer him,
because he cannot after all experience something as happiness that is
just handed him as an unearned gift. If some creator or other had
undertaken the creation of man with the thought in mind of bestowing
happiness upon his likeness at the same time, as an inheritance, then
he would have done better to leave him uncreated. The fact that what
man creates is always ruthlessly destroyed again raises his stature;
for he must always build and create anew; and it is in activity that
our happiness lies; it lies in what we ourselves accomplish. It is
the same with bestowed happiness as with revealed truth. Only this is
worthy of man: that he seek truth himself, that neither experience
nor revelation lead him. When that has been thoroughly recognized
once and for all, then the religions based on revelation will be
finished. The human being will then no longer want God to reveal
Himself or bestow blessings upon him. He will want to know through
his own thinking and to establish his happiness through his own
strength. Whether some higher power or other guides our fate to the
good or to the bad, this does not concern us at all; we ourselves
must determine the path we have to travel. The loftiest idea of God
is still the one which assumes that God, after His creation of the
human being, withdrew completely from the world and gave man
completely over to himself.

Whoever acknowledges to thinking its ability to perceive beyond the
grasp of the senses must necessarily acknowledge that it also has
objects that lie beyond merely sense-perceptible reality. The objects
of thinking, however, are ideas. Inasmuch as thinking takes
possession of the idea, thinking fuses with the primal ground of
world existence; what is at work outside enters into the spirit of
man: he becomes one with objective reality in its highest potency.
Becoming aware of the idea within reality is the true communion of
man.

Thinking has the same significance with respect to ideas as the eye
has with respect to light, the ear to tone. It is an organ of
apprehension.

This view is in a position to unite two things that are regarded
today as completely incompatible: the empirical method, and idealism
as a scientific world view. It is believed that to accept the former
means necessarily to reject the latter. This is absolutely not true.
To be sure, if one considers the senses to be the only organs of
apprehension for objective reality, then one must arrive at the above
view. For, the senses offer us only such relationships of things as
can be traced back to mechanical laws. And the mechanistic world view
would thus be given as the only true form of any such world view. In
this, one is making the mistake of simply overlooking the other
component parts of reality which are just as objective but which
cannot be traced back to mechanical laws. What is objectively
given by no means coincides with what is sense-perceptibly
given, as the mechanistic world conception believes. What is
sense-perceptibly given is only half of the given. The other half of
the given is ideas, which are also objects of experience — of a
higher experience, to be sure, whose organ is thinking. Ideas are
also accessible to the inductive method.

Today's science of sense experience follows the altogether correct
method of holding fast to the given; but it adds the inadmissible
assertion that this method can provide only facts of a
sense-perceptible nature. Instead of limiting itself to the question
of how we arrive at our views, this science determines from
the start what we can see. The only satisfactory way to grasp
reality is the empirical method with idealistic results. That is
idealism, but not of the kind that pursues some nebulous, dreamed-up
unity of things, but rather of a kind that seeks the concrete
ideal content of reality in a way that is just as much in accordance
with experience as is the search of modern hyper-exact science for
the factual content.

By approaching Goethe with these views, we believe we are entering
into his essential nature. We hold fast to idealism and develop it,
not on the basis of Hegel's dialectic method, but rather upon a
clarified higher empiricism.

This kind of empiricism also underlies the philosophy of Eduard v.
Hartmann. Eduard v. Hartmann seeks the ideal unity in nature, as this
does positively yield itself to a thinking that has real content.
He rejects the merely mechanistic view of nature and the
hyper-Darwinism that is stuck on externals. In science, he is the
founder of a concrete monism. In history and aesthetics, he seeks
concrete ideas, and does all this according to empirical inductive
methods.

Hartmann's philosophy differs from mine only on the question of
pessimism and through the metaphysical orientation of his system
toward the “unconscious.” We will consider the latter
point further on in the book. But with respect to pessimism, let the
following be said: What Hartmann cites as grounds for
pessimism — i.e., for the view that nothing in the world can
fully satisfy us, that pain always outweighs pleasure — that is
precisely what I would designate as the good fortune of mankind.
What he brings forward is for me only proof that it is futile to
strive for happiness. We must, in fact, entirely give up any such
striving and seek our destiny purely in selflessly fulfilling those
ideal tasks that our reason prescribes for us. What else does this
mean than that we should seek our happiness only in doing, in
unflagging activity?

Only the active person, indeed only the selflessly active person who
seeks no recompense for his activity, fulfills his destiny. It is
foolish to want to be recompensed for one's activity; there is no
true recompense. Here Hartmann ought to build further. He ought to
show what, with such presuppositions, can be the only mainspring of
all our actions. This can, when the prospect of a goal one is
striving for falls away, only be the selfless devotion to the object
to which one is dedicating one's activity; this can only be love.
Only an action out of love can be a moral one. In science, the idea,
and in our action, love, must be our guiding star. And this
brings us back to Goethe. “The main thing for the active person
is that he do what is right; he should not worry about whether the
right occurs.” “Our whole feat consists in giving up our
existence in order to exist”
(Aphorisms in Prose).

I have not arrived at my world view only through the study of Goethe
or even of Hegelianism, for example. I took my start from the
mechanistic-naturalistic conception of the world, but recognized
that, with intensive thinking, one cannot remain there. Proceeding
strictly according to natural-scientific methods, I found in
objective idealism the only satisfying world view. My epistemology
[ 46 ]
shows the way by which a kind of thinking that
understands itself and is not self-contradictory arrives at this
world view. I then found that this objective idealism, in its basic
features, permeates the Goethean world view. Thus the elaborating of
my views does, to be sure, for years now run parallel with my study
of Goethe; and I have never found any conflict in principle
between my basic views and the Goethean scientific activity. I
consider my task fulfilled if I have been at least partially
successful in, firstly, developing my standpoint in such a way that
it can also become alive in other people, and secondly, bringing
about the conviction that this standpoint really is the Goethean one.